The Education Justice Project of the University of Illinois hosted a symposium titled “Higher Education in U.S. Prisons: Strategies for Action” Friday, October 8th through Sunday, October 10th, 2010. The symposium brought together academics and activists from across the country to talk about the higher education operating inside of correctional facilities in the United States.
The panels were composed of researchers and organizers from across the country who look at higher education in prison or work with a program that provides higher education in prison. Discussions focused on pedagogy, post-release issues, fund-raising challenges, and the various impacts of race, class and gender upon higher education in prison. In accord with the nature of the subject matter, the panels were be cross-disciplinary, not only reaching across a variety of departments at the University of Illinois: Education Policy Studies, History, English, and Landscape Architecture to name a few, but also across a variety of colleges and universities from across the country. Speakers were invited from all the college-in-prison programs in the US, and more than a dozen sent representatives to the symposium.
The goal of the symposium was to expand intellectual discussions of higher education in prison to a national scale. There have been very few national-level discussions of this type, and we hoped that getting these topics on the table would address an important need in helping to define challenges, vision, etc of higher education in prison.
